“What Do I Need That For?”: The Misalignment of Masculinity and College Preparation in an Urban School

Abstract

Young Black and Latino men face profound academic obstacles in transitioning to college. Few studies have interrogated college readiness practices in urban schools through the lens of masculinity. Drawing on a yearlong ethnography, this study investigated how young men respond to college-readiness practices while enacting masculinity. Many young men were not convinced that working hard in their classes was necessary for their college futures. College preparation stressed seriousness and vulnerability, but masculine intellectualism was playful and tough. The contrast implies the need for college readiness practices better aligned with common experiences of masculinity in urban contexts.

“Girls, I notice, they really like doing work,” Leo told me, reflecting on the academic behaviors of young men and young women. His perception was not unfounded. At Sunrise High School where Leo attended, an urban high school serving nearly entirely Black and Latinx youth, young women in the junior class earned on average a GPA more than a half a point higher than the young men. In the AP classes, those Leo avoided, young women outnumbered young men by almost two to one. He watched his masculine peers in his classes, often distracted by their phones or by one another, ignoring the instructions of their frustrated teachers. On many counts, young men were less successful academically than young women at Sunrise High School.

Despite the patterns Leo observed at Sunrise, whether young women really liked doing work was unclear, but they certainly seemed to do more of it than young men. Indeed, an extensive body of research has begun to investigate the underperformance of young men in schools. In particular, young Black and Latino men in school face steep academic challenges. They are deemed “bad” by middle and high school teachers (Ferguson, 2020; Musto, 2019). They are targeted for discipline in classrooms and beyond (Rios, 2011). They are less likely to participate in advanced high school coursework (College Board, 2019) and to enroll in college (Harper, 2012; Saenz & Ponjuan, 2009). These struggles have led to much intellectual theorizing about how to improve the academic performance of Black and Latino young men (Fergus et al., 2014; Howard, 2014).

In this ethnographic study, I sought to uncover the ways in which the zealous urgings from teachers to students to work hard in class to prepare for college collided with the experiences of students navigating marginalized masculinity in an urban school. I asked, how do young men respond to the college readiness emphasis of their high school curricula in ways informed by ideologies of masculinity in marginalized contexts? Despite a teaching staff predominantly of color and wholly committed to expanding educational opportunities for racially minoritized youth, young men at Sunrise High School struggled to meaningfully engage with the curriculum. In this context, I interrogated why young men tended to underperform in comparison to the young women in classrooms. At Sunrise, messages encouraging students to work hard in school were mostly grounded in notions of fear and nervousness about one's future academic success and college readiness. If students did not study, they would not be prepared for life after high school. Though many young women were convinced by this argument, most young men were not. They were confident and unafraid by threats of academic under-preparedness. While they maintained a playful intellectualism outside of the classroom, they resisted intellectualism within it. The anxious appeals college preparation at Sunrise High School ran against young men's sense of self grounded in notions of toughness in school settings.

College Readiness and its Cultural Irrelevance in Urban Schooling Contexts

An emphasis on college-going has recently come to inform educational policy and practice. Efforts to expand college access have undergirded much state- and national-level policy in K-12 education (Blume & Zumeta, 2014). The Common Core State Standards were explicitly designed around college readiness and have been evaluated on the extent to which they prepare students for college (Conley et al., 2011). “College for all” and “college preparatory” practices have proliferated, particularly among charter schools in urban neighborhoods (Farmer-Hinton, 2011). College readiness practices are intended to be rigorous (Glass & Nygreen, 2011; Sanchez & Cruce, 2019) and programs like Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate, and dual enrollment have grown to better prepare more students for college (Burns & Leu, 2019). While few would argue that all students need to go to college, the economic benefits of a college degree, by many calculations, are profound (Johnson & Mejia, 2020). College readiness, particularly in urban high school contexts, has become a central goal of U.S. schooling.

College access messaging and policy in the United States presumes the inadequacy of urban schools and their students and the necessity of hard work among racially minoritized youth. Indeed, much research has found college readiness programs in high schools serving marginalized youth to be inadequate (Castro, 2021; Cipollone and Stich, 2017; Hallett & Venegas, 2011; Strayhorn, 2009) and American College Testing (2018) deems less than a quarter of first-generation, low-income students of color as prepared for college. Without effective preparation, students face academic repercussions during their college transitions (Jackson & Kurlaender, 2014). Because of insufficient preparation, the onus rests on marginalized students to vigorously pursue academic preparation for college in high school. The high stakes and expectations involved in college preparation are connected to a sense of overwhelm and fear among students (Martinez et al., 2020). Racially minoritized students are urged to work diligently towards college readiness in ways that emphasize deficiency over strength (Brown, 2013; Convertino & Graboski-Bauer, 2018) and struggle over joy (Crumb et al., 2021). Sober messages of college readiness shape the tenor of college preparation in urban schools, and this messaging likely has implications for the educational experiences of young Black and Latino men.

A key challenge of engaging racially minoritized youth in academic preparation regards cultural disconnects between home and school. Scholars have long described how classroom cultural mismatch can hinder educational opportunity for marginalized students (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Ferguson, 2020; Howard, 2014; Willis, 1977). Paris (2012) contends, “monocultural and monolingual” curricula require that students of color

lose their heritage and community ways with language, literacy, and culture in order to achieve in U.S. schools. And this saga of linguistic and cultural loss has had and continues to have devastating effects for the access and achievement of students and communities of color in U.S. public schools (p. 96).

Culturally relevant pedagogy seeks to bridge home and schooling contexts. The approach, as articulated by Ladson-Billings (1995), maintains high academic standards while connecting students with home cultures and engaging them in urgent questions of community concern. In so doing, the pedagogy connects students” identities and experiences to academic rigor. More recently, scholars have advanced notions of culturally relevant pedagogy to emphasize the importance of sustaining cultural heterogeneity through classroom curricula (Alim & Paris, 2017; Paris, 2012). Irizarry (2017) emphasizes the importance of allowing racially minoritized students to “develop their cultural identities and a positive sense of self while critically engaging in the systems in which they are being educated” (p. 83). In their extensive review of the literature on culturally relevant education, Aronson and Laughter (2016) find extensive scholarly support for the capacity of culturally relevant pedagogy to draw students into robust and rigorous curricula. Dee and Penner (2017), in a regression discontinuity study, find that exposure to culturally relevant curricula in a San Francisco Unified School District ethnic studies program increased attendance by 21 percentage points and GPA by 1.4 points during the year they were enrolled in the course. The benefits were especially concentrated among young men of color, a group whose challenges in schools are particularly acute (Noguera, 2009). Thus, the available evidence suggests culturally relevant teachers can bring curricula closer to student realities and transform their educational trajectories, and this seems particularly true for young men of color.

Unfortunately, culturally relevant approaches are mostly foreign to practices of college-readiness (Kolluri & Tierney, 2020). Many early theories of college readiness emphasized the technical and rational-choice processes of the college transition, ignoring the systems of race and gender that inform college-going for marginalized students (Acevedo-Gil, 2017; Perna, 2006). For example, Hossler and Gallagher (1987) describe a sequential choice model of college-going that largely excludes an analysis of the experiences of students from non-dominant cultures (Acevedo-Gil, 2017). Corwin and Tierney (2007) outline the liniments of high-school “college-going culture” but do not address how to align college-going cultures with the cultures of racially minoritized students. While this work has been essential in supporting educators to build college-going supports, attention to race, class, and gender present additional challenges to college-going equity. Some theorists have begun to emphasize the ways in which culture might be considered when analyzing the college transition (Acevedo-Gil, 2017; Jayakumar et al., 2013; Knight & Marciano, 2015; Knight-Manuel et al., 2019; Tierney, 1999; Welton & Martinez, 2014) and Noll (2022) demonstrates that a misalignment of student worldview with the college-going practices of one's high school can cause disequilibrium for students. Unfortunately, policies of college preparedness often fail to incorporate culturally relevant approaches (Kolluri & Tierney, 2020).

The cultural irrelevance of college readiness practices may be particularly pertinent to young men, a group who has demonstrated sensitivity to culturally relevant pedagogy (Dee & Penner, 2017) and have struggled to successfully make the college transition. Young men of color in urban high schools are caught between the urgency of college readiness and the cultural irrelevance of much college preparation. They are told to be anxious about their college-going prospects and to work hard to maximize chances of future success. These calls, however, are often devoid of any substantive connection to their identities and experiences as young men. Understanding how young men might prepare for college necessitates understanding how they experience their social worlds and how college preparatory pedagogies might make meaningful connections to young men's cultural realities. Next, leveraging the theoretical literature on marginalized masculinity, I consider how young men make sense of their identities and how this sense of self might shape their engagement with college-readiness opportunities.

Theorizing Black and Latino Masculinity in the College Readiness Context

Young Black and Latino men are underserved by four-year universities in the United States. Latino men have been described as “vanishing” from college campuses (Saenz & Ponjuan, 2009), and the college prospects of Black men has been described as “dismal” (Harper, 2012). In 2018, 41% of Black women between the ages of 18 and 24 were enrolled in college compared to just 33% of Black men. There exists a similar gap between Latino women and men—40% to 32% (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020). The challenges Black and Latino young men experience during the college transition are in line with their more general academic challenges in schools. In elementary schools, Black and Latino boys trail their peers on achievement tests in literacy and math (Voyer & Voyer, 2014). In high school, they become particularly disconnected from school, experiencing teachers as antagonistic and curricula as disconnected from present realities (Ferguson, 2020; Rios, 2011). Though certainly, resource deprivations and harmful treatment by educators constrain their postsecondary trajectories (Huerta, 2015), these young men are also navigating dominant ideologies of masculinity in deciding how to engage in schools.

In what follows, I outline theories of masculinity and consider how they inform young men's engagement with academic preparation for college. As theories, they provide useful frameworks for exploring young men's experiences in schools. However, social theories are not facts, and the processes they explicate are experienced differently across different social contexts (Burawoy, 1998). Through interrogation and empirical research, these frameworks might undergo further specification. Specific to this study, young men's experiences in college readiness at Sunrise High School can illuminate and nuance theoretical understandings of masculinity in urban schooling contexts.

Masculinities—Hegemonic and Marginalized

Social theorists of masculinity argue that masculinity is socially constructed and inscribed with power relations that shape young men's interactions in their social worlds. Pascoe and Bridges (2016) describe masculinity as “what makes one a man.” (Pascoe & Bridges, 2016). In “making a man,” theories of masculinity assert that young men both act and are acted upon in the construction of masculine identity. On the one hand, Black and Latino men enact masculinity “as a central vehicle by which [they] attempt to compensate for race and class subordination.” (Rios & Sarabia, 2016). On the other hand, dominant ideals of manhood act upon young men, punishing them for failing to enact socially sanctioned visions of hegemonic masculinity (Morris, 2012; Pascoe, 2011). Thus, theorists have envisioned the experience of masculinity as a multidirectional phenomenon, unfolding between individual action and social expectations.

In understanding masculinity at this intersection of individual behavior and social structure, masculinity theories emphasize the power dynamics young men are negotiating when enacting masculinity. They assert that young men have agency in enacting masculinity, but certain visions of masculine identity are conferred power and others undergo scorn. Young men “do gender” (West & Zimmerman, 1987, p. 126), and while young men can enact masculinity in a multitude of ways, how young men choose to enact masculinity is circumscribed by power relations. Connell (1995) described the stratified nature of masculinity, defining “hegemonic” masculinity as the version of assigned preeminent status in Western society. “Hegemonic” masculinity, she writes, entails characteristics typical of modern expectations of manhood—toughness, confidence, and physical strength. These traits offer social advantages to men who successfully display them.

In attempting to enact a gender, however, racially minoritized and working-class young men may find a hegemonic vision of masculinity to be elusive, and researchers have found that they develop masculinity in ways that may be particularly self-destructive (Pyke, 1996; Rios, 2011). At the intersection of gender and race, masculinities become “marginalized” (Connell, 1995) and in schools, attempts to perform hegemonic masculinity among Black and Latino young men may be interpreted as hypermasculine (Morris, 2011). Young men navigating these challenges of masculinity can become resistant to dominant cultural expectations. Majors and Billson (1993) argue that systemic oppressions compels hyper-masculine dispositions among marginalized young men. What they describe as “cool pose” is a stylistic defense to social oppression, allowing Black men to maintain a dignity amidst persistent racial sleights that they endure in their social worlds. A recent analysis by Unnever and Chouhy (2021) found that though Black men were not more likely than their White peers to believe in the necessity of violence if provoked, they reported feeling more pressure to act tough and exert dominance. Elevated pressures of masculinity have compelled much theorizing on the notion of toughness among marginalized young men.

These definitions of masculinity are admittedly multitudinous and cloudy. Inevitably, different young men—even those in similar social contexts—will enact masculinity in different ways. However, for the purposes of this analysis, I understand masculinity in urban context to involve elevated pressures for young Black and Latino to exhibit toughness in their social world—to demonstrate invulnerability to potential harm and to assert dominance in social interactions.

Masculinity and the Contradictions of Toughness

While masculinity is certainly dynamic and multifaceted, I attempt here to theorize “toughness” and the contradictions it engenders. Toughness, by definition, simultaneously calls on young men to be carefree and to care deeply. They should not worry, because worrying suggests vulnerability, but they should worry about their own strength and dominance, lest they show themselves to be vulnerable. This dual challenge of toughness—caring little or caring a lot—might present difficulties for young Black and Latino men in schools.

In regards to caring little, scholars of masculinity have demonstrated that a playful, care-free attitude characterizes many young men's engagement in their urban schools. Willis (1977) captured “lads” seeking to “have a laff” at teachers” expense. MacLeod (2018) described “hallway hangers” who cut class to drink alcohol have fun. Morris (2012) describes an urban school in which gender is produced through mockery and play—young men define the parameters of masculinity by making fun of one another for academic seriousness or an inability to “join the fun” of acceptable forms of masculine entertainment. Playful masculine performance is embodied by Black forms of artistic “cool” like dance, rap, and verbal sparring (Majors & Billson, 1993). This emphasis on fun, laughter, and performance, according to these theorists, permits marginalized young men to demonstrate fearlessness in the face of often harrowing realities of urban poverty.

In regards to caring a lot, theories of masculinity also emphasize that norms of toughness require a profound concern for one's strength and dominance (Connell, 1995). Historically, the ready availability of American land in an untamed frontier encouraged men to be tough, independent, and to resist the control of their urban bosses of industrial production (Kimmel, 2006). Masculine toughness may be particularly resonant among the working class (Hochstetler et al., 2014; Iacuone, 2005). Kasson (2001) noted that media and political imagery of the “perfect man” center courage as essential to the performance of masculinity. Toughness as dominance might also be epistemic, manifesting as “mansplaining” to silence less masculine social actors (Dular, 2021). In urban contexts, Anderson (2000) described a “code of the street” for Black young men that necessitates aggressive posturing and often-violent responses to perceive disrespect. They adopt what Majors and Billson (1993) describe as “a bravado that dispels all appearances of fear” (p. 44). Rios (2011) demonstrated how the criminalization of young Black and Latino men leads them towards resistance to authority and produces a masculine celebration of dominance and physical strength. In school's, Pascoe (2011) found that young men routinely police one another's expressions of toughness. According to the theoretical literature on masculinity, carefree performances among young men are accompanied by a careful attention to dominance and invulnerability.

Navigating the contradictions of masculine toughness in urban schooling contexts may present significant challenges especially with respect to college preparations. Amidst contradictory norms of masculinity, scholars have found penalties for caring too much about school (Morris, 2012) or caring too little about strength and dominance (Pascoe, 2011). These rules, their implications for masculine power, and the resulting performances of masculinity likely have implications for college-going. Given the cultural irrelevance of many college-going practices and the challenges of young men during the college transition (Kolluri & Tierney, 2020; Noll, 2022), young men may benefit from “gender-relevant pedagogy” (Bristol, 2015) that can better connect their identities and experiences to school. What gender relevance looks like in college preparatory efforts of urban schools, however, is under-investigated in the scholarly literature. In this study, I consider gender relevance and explore the extent to which academic preparation for college amplifies the contradictions of toughness for young men of color. Thus, the question I seek to interrogate here is, how do young men respond to the college readiness emphasis of their high school curricula in ways informed by ideologies of masculinity in marginalized contexts? In so doing, I illuminate educational processes at the intersection of gender, race, and college readiness.

Methods

The data presented here are from an ethnographic investigation into gender and academic engagement at an urban high school. The objective of ethnography is to understand the cultural meanings within a social world. Specifically, this inquiry was designed to capture the interpretations of gender and academic preparation at Sunrise High School. Below, I outline the methods of data collection and analysis that guided the study.

Data Collection

The inquiry was conducted at Sunrise High School, a not-by-design small school in California that has been losing families to nearby charters for more than a decade. The “urban” school community aligns most closely with Milner and Lomotey's (2021) categorization of “urban intensive”—densely populated areas where significant proportions of the populations are marginalized by race, class, and immigration status. The presumption in this context is that urban schools have served as the “cauldron, where the struggle for justice has played itself out,” and they “reflect and reinforce the ideological, economic, and social foundations of society (Noguera & Alicea, 2021, p. 26).

Sunrise High serves around seven hundred total students, and nearly all of them are Black and Latinx from working-class households. Few students achieve proficiency on English Language Arts and mathematics state tests, and the school is categorized in the lowest achievement band on the California school accountability system. However, the school's graduation rates are above the state average at 86%. The school faces resource shortages—old and deteriorating classrooms, some teachers with spotty attendance, and whole buildings that have been abandoned amidst shrinking enrollment. The school's challenges are aligned with the broader struggles of deep community disinvestment such as White flight, redlining, and now gentrification that are an all-to-common story in the urban enclaves of the U.S. (Rothstein, 2017).

However, Sunrise is unique in that most of the faculty are Black or Latinx. Rather than “White folks who teach in the hood” (Emdin, 2016), the administrators, counselors, and teachers were people of color who drew on their lived experiences growing up in marginalized communities. They believed in the possibility of academic success for the students, and behavioral disruptions were rare. Fights were an unusual occurrence on campus, and multiple Black fraternities existed to harness young men's strengths and direct them towards college success. While teachers occasionally adopted deficit narratives of young men and their families, they were more likely to describe their young men as “brilliant” rather than “bad” (see Musto, 2019). The research site is unique in the extent to which educators were committed to the community in which the school was situated.

The data from this study are drawn in part from interviews of forty juniors out of 168 at Sunrise high school, seven teachers, two administrators, and two counselors. I focused on the junior class given its level of academic rigor, the tendency for student to stratify into advanced and regular coursework, and its importance to postsecondary access. I connected with teachers of juniors—one White, five Black, and one Latino—by approaching them during the school and asking about a potential interview. Teachers were provided with informed consent documents for their interviews. I asked them about their goals for their classrooms and their approaches to designing pedagogy. Visiting their classrooms, I reached out to students who needed to return a parent consent form to participate. Of the forty students, 25 were boys and 15 were girls. Though this study is not explicitly comparative, interviewing young women helped me get a sense of how college-going was understood by way of gender at Sunrise. The students were recruited to capture the diversity of students in the junior class. They included 4.0 students and boys and girls who were in danger of dropping out. Interviewees were Black, Latinx, and Pacific Islander. They included students very involved in extracurriculars and students largely disconnected from the school community. The interviews lasted 30–45 min and included questions about identity, academic engagement, and college preparation.

The research also included approximately 150 hours of participant observation. I introduced myself to the school community through the principal who was interested in learning more about how young men considered academic engagement at Sunrise High School. There was interest among many staff members to understand why their young men did not engage in school as deeply as many of the young women. Indeed, a cursory observation of AP courses and college-going statistics suggested gendered inequalities reminiscent of many other schools serving Black and Latino youth (Harper, 2012; Kolluri, 2020; Lackey & Lowery, 2020; Saenz & Ponjuan, 2009). The principal encouraged me to volunteer in an AVID classroom where I might get to connect with students committed to a college-going future. I observed academic and elective classrooms, noting patterns of student engagement. I attended sporting events. I chatted with students at picnic benches as they ate lunch. I grew close to many students and teachers. I visited students in their homes and met their parents. In my time on campus, I was foreign, yet commonplace, adopting the position familiar to ethnographers as an “insider-outsider.” I was deeply connected to the students, teachers, and families, but left the neighborhood to return to my own at the end of each day of data collection.

My social distance from the students was substantial. I was in my mid-thirties, from a middle-class upbringing. Some of the experiences that students described from their school and home lives, I could not relate to. However, as a brown, multiracial former teacher in urban schools, I felt comfortable on the Sunrise campus and found it easy to connect with the people there. The teachers reminded me of former colleagues, and the students reminded me of my former pupils. Also, I am a father of two multiracial boys, and many of the questions the young men were considering regarding academic engagement, marginality, and masculinity are some of the same ones I am considering with my sons. My identity and experienced influenced the data collection process and my interactions at Sunrise High School.

In collecting the data, I aimed for trustworthiness (Guba, 1981). Three components were considered here: credibility, transferability, and dependability. To achieve credibility, Guba (1981) emphasizes the importance of persistent observation over an extended time to researchers to triangulate across multiple sources to confirm patterns in the data. I also conducted member checks with students who were most often observed in the study to ensure I was correctly interpreting student comments and observations. Second, regarding transferability, I aimed for “thick description” of the context and observed phenomena to allow readers to consider whether the findings might apply to other contexts. Lastly, with respect to dependability, I employed multiple methods—interviews and observations—to check for stability of the patterns being observed, ensuring that what I was hearing or seeing was not a mere idiosyncrasy, but a pervasive feature of the experiences at Sunrise High School.

Data Analysis

Data analysis occurred concurrently with data collection. I transcribed jottings from the field into more coherent field notes shortly after each observation session. I wrote analytic memos intermittently, synthesizing various observations and interview comments and considering emerging themes. In writing the memos, I considered the experiences of the young men and prominent theories of masculinity, schooling, and college readiness. Particular moments of student resistance or comments from interviews could be understood through the theoretical lenses of masculinity. In addition, the different ways in which young men responded—by way of expressions of play or invulnerability—further delineated nuances of theories of masculinity. Memoing during data collection provided substantial opportunities to consider the implications of the data as it was being collected.

These emerging themes—the illuminations and distinctions of the theoretical understandings of masculinity—laid the groundwork for a two-step coding process that leveraged deductive and inductive data analysis processes. I read all field notes and interviews at least twice. In a first pass, all data was coded using an “in-vivo” coding process (Saldaña, 2013). I coded data by abstracting words and phrases used by research participants in interviews and observations. Combining the in-vivo codes with the themes that emerged from memoing, I developed a codebook around major themes and subcodes that would be applied to a second read of the transcripts and field notes. These included codes like “gendered performance,” “college confidence” and “cultural relevance.” From this process I wove together themes from prominent theories of masculinity and the specific experiences of students and teachers at an urban high school. In so doing, I elevated the perspectives and observations relevant to how young men responded to the college readiness emphasis of Sunrise High School. I turn now to the findings of this research.

Young Men and the Challenge of College Readiness at Sunrise High School

A Black young man I call Sosaia arrived late to his chemistry class and blended seamlessly into the classroom commotion during a lecture on orbitals. It was the week of Halloween, and Sosaia toyed excitedly with a spooky-noise speaker and a container of fake blood. He turned up the volume of the speaker enough to interrupt Mr. Gunther's lecture on orbitals. While urging students to “consider our friend chlorine,” Mr. Gunther stopped abruptly, frustrated by the noise. “Pay attention so I can teach you some chemistry!” Mr. Gunther told Sosaia.

“I don't want to learn chemistry,” Sosaia responded.

Mr. Gunther shot back, “We all need chemistry. Chemistry keeps us alive,” and returned to the chemistry lecture. Sosaia, however, continued not learning chemistry. Minutes later, a suddenly attentive Sosaia raised his hand high in the air. Mr. Gunther called on him. Sosaia straightened himself up in his chair, seeming to posture himself for a question of profound importance.

“In the future, how am I going to use this in my daily life?” he asked.

Mr. Gunther hesitated before answering. “I’ll tell you what I did in high school, and what I did in college. I learned it,” he told Sosaia. Mr. Gunther continued with meandering stories from his experience in high school and college chemistry, but they tested Sosaia's patience. “Did you forget the question I asked you?” a frustrated Sosaia asked. Mr. Gunther had not answered how chemistry would be useful in his daily life.

“I’ll tell you,” Mr. Gunther responded with newfound determination. He made his way to a wall at the side of his room where California's college requirements were posted. Looking closely at the 8 ½ by 11 sheet of paper, he confirmed that physical science was a requirement for college acceptance. “This is a college prep class,” he said matter-of-factly.

Sosaia looked to the ceiling in exasperation. He was unconvinced by Mr. Gunther's college readiness argument. “I don't want to know the answer anymore!” he said and urged Mr. Gunther to move on with the lesson. Mr. Gunther did. Soon thereafter, Sosaia walked out of the classroom over Mr. Gunther's frustrated protests. I eventually stopped seeing Sosaia on campus, and Mr. Gunther told me he had left the school entirely.

While such dramatic classroom exits were rare at Sunrise High School, boys often escaped rigorous academics more subtly: they avoided challenging classes, completed work sloppily and quickly, and copied their peers on tests and assignments. The school's sales pitch for academic engagement fell short among these young men. Academic challenge at Sunrise High School was framed most commonly as a means for college preparation. The eager advocacy of college readiness from their teachers, however, was met with resistance among many of the young men who were largely unconvinced they needed to prepare for college. This sentiment was more prominent among the young men than the young women. Instead, boys wanted to play. However, their playful tendencies in schools belied an intellectualism expressed regularly in other contexts. They engaged intellectually not to prepare for college, but when it was fun and aligned with their senses of self.

The findings here illustrate the unique misalignment between expressions of Black and Latino masculinity at Sunrise High School and culturally irrelevant curricula grounded significantly in ideals of college readiness. First, I demonstrate the ways in which college readiness ideologies at Sunrise High School were abstracted from the cultures and communities of Sunrise students. Next, I illuminate the gendered responses to messages about college preparation grounded in fear and vulnerability, with young women believing in the importance of hard work for college success and young men expressing skepticism. Lastly, I outline the playful, intellectual interests of young men that manifested outside of classrooms rather than within them, illustrating ways that these more playful, culturally connected forms of intellectualism might be incorporated into college preparatory curricula.

College Readiness and Cultural Irrelevance in the Classroom

Believing in college

Teachers and counselors at Sunrise High School messaged the importance of college-going, and the students, appreciative of their teachers, internalized the messaging. “We are trying to build a college-going culture on our campus,” the school's veteran counselor told me. The assistant principal expressed a similar sentiment, remarking that students at Sunrise needed to “be more prepared for what's going to hit them when they go to college, and nothing ever really prepares you for that.” This sense of urgency around college readiness was echoed by the teachers who sought to design college preparatory learning opportunities for their students. The school was seeking to expand access to Advanced Placement in part for this reason. The AP US History teacher said, “Students especially here in the inner-city, students were not prepared for college. Even after they had taken the senior English course, they would go to college and they would come back to me and say, “Wow, I wasn't prepared.”” She argued that classes needed to prepare students for college success. One teacher opened a Black fraternity chapter at the high school with an explicit mission to “increase the number of college-bound young Black males.” Students generally appreciated their teachers. A Black young man explained that his teachers of color at Sunrise “care for your education more than a lot of others.” A young Black woman remarked, “I appreciate every teacher. I look up to every teacher I have.”

Amidst the college messaging, all students I interviewed expressed a strong, unwavering desire to attend college. College was widely viewed as essential to social mobility at Sunrise High School. “Ever since we were small,” a young woman shared in a class discussion, “we’ve had it embedded in our brain that we had to go to college,” In a class discussion, another young woman ridiculed recent popular discourse that college was unnecessary. “You watch a YouTuber saying, “you don't have to go to college!”… Yes, skinny white girl who probably buys Starbucks every day,” she said with an unmissable tone of mockery in her voice. Other students agreed that skipping college was not a choice. “People like us have to do it for survival,” added one young woman. When the teacher, playing devil's advocate, countered that they might be able to start a business without a college degree, a young woman exclaimed “I don't got money to start a business!” A Belizean American young man, agreed. Students from this community needed to attend college, “unless they win the lottery or something.”

In interviews, young men expressed a similar commitment to college-going as the young women. One young man, a Latino, told me, “I want to make it big. I want to go to where those top universities are, one of the UC's, actually be the first generation in my family to go to college.” Another tied college to an explicit career aspiration, noting, “I have to get to school get to college and that I get all the experience I need so I can get a career in [video] game design.” A Black student shared, “School is really important to me because I want to go to college.” Even a chronically absent, young Black man, uniquely unfocused in class, envisioned for himself a future at Morehouse College, “where Martin Luther King went.” Though for many young men, sports often competed with academics, one young man described a “books before balls” approach that was echoed by many others. For young men and women alike at Sunrise High School, college was a clearly defined future goal.

The cultural irrelevance of college preparation

The pedagogical approach to college readiness was heavy on basic-skill development, even in the school's most advanced classes. “Our kids are lacking when it comes to reading comprehension and the way just the multiple-choice, the short response, is all composed is to allow for students to develop their reading skills, which is what happens when you go to college,” the AP US History teacher explained. Textbooks and lectures were valorized in most classes, and almost all of the teachers I observed used them for almost the entirety of their instruction. Students distractedly copied notes from PowerPoint slides or answered end-of-chapter textbook questions. Despite the occasional innovative assignment, the curriculum was largely devoid of in-depth projects or essays that connected to their lives or communities. Complaints of boredom were pervasive. Heads hit desks and bathroom passes went worn from overuse. When a young Latino man noticed my own distraction during a particularly meandering physics lesson, he asked me, “Are you being reminded that school is a long day?”

Ideologies of college preparation pushed aside more engaging, relevant learning opportunities at Sunrise High School. When a student in an AP English course asked if they could do a research project about a topic of their choosing, the teacher declined her request. He answered “That's not pertinent to our exam.” A Latina student taking four AP classes and earning among the highest grades across the junior class, described the impact of the pedagogy on her learning.

We care more about the grade than we do about learning. And that kind of sucks. Because I find, being honest … I don't feel if you learn a lot here. We just focus more on “I want that good grade, so I’m going to focus more on getting that good grade and memorizing stuff rather than actually learning it and retaining it. Because all I care about is getting that good grade.”

Work was completed for the purpose of appeasing teachers and maintaining GPAs. Teachers framed the purpose of challenging academic curriculum as to earn high marks and prepare for future college success.

Gender and the Response to College Readiness

AP courses were billed as the premier settings for college preparation at Sunrise High School. Though young men and young women expressed similar enthusiasm for college-going, young women outnumbered young men by almost two-to-one in Advanced Placement. Why would young men avoid “college preparatory” AP classes if they hoped to one day attend college? I asked this question to some of the young men reluctant to try AP. Like many of his masculine peers, Simon saw no connection between AP classes and college preparedness. “I don't care about all the AP/honor stuff. I just want to get my grades, graduate and enjoy my life,” he told me.

The young men differed from the young women on this question of working hard to prepare for college in classes like Advanced Placement. Lucas and Nadia were brother and sister. On a walk to a local McDonalds, I talked with them about taking on academic challenges and getting ready for college. I asked Nadia if she planned to take any AP courses. “I’ll take honors classes or AP classes so it can get me ready for a college or to push me so I can be ready or I can learn more—experience more than a regular class,” she explained. I asked Lucas if he agreed with his sister about the value of AP classes. He tried to convince his sister they were not worth the trouble. “You can still get into college without AP!” he exclaimed. Nadia talked about the importance of pushing yourself and believed that if their mom knew that they were not taking challenging classes, she would be mad at him for not pushing himself academically. “Sports wise, I’ll push myself,” Lucas said. “Academics wise,” he didn't.

Even without challenging coursework, young men were confident in their ability to succeed in college classes. Quincy agreed with his best friend Lucas that hard academic work in high school was not necessary for his future academic success. “I have family that is in college and it don't seem like they doing anything hard to me. I don't see anything that they doing that I can't do.” Though the teachers argued that hard work in their classes would prepare them for a college-going future, this pitch for academic engagement was largely unheard by the young men who were unworried about being unprepared for college. One young man described his desire for an education that was more connected to his life and community.

I don't see why I would need to write the most perfect essay or to so solve the longest hardest most complex math problem. I don't really feel passion about that. It's not something I want to do with my life. The more they tell us that this is high school you need this … I don't think teachers themselves use these equations. It's only mathematicians and nobody is going to go into that field, so I don't see why they don't realize that and think about … what we need as citizen.

Simon noted about his classes, “I feel like I don't even knowledge that they’re throwing at me. what do I need that for?”

Young women, meanwhile, were more likely to see a purpose to working hard in school, and they described this purpose as connected to their anxiety about college. Young women were worried that coming from a school like Sunrise might put them at an academic disadvantage. One told me,

I feel like one of my biggest fears is going to college and not like having knowledge or … having the skills like other people from different colleges or from other high schools. I feel like they are far off way more prepared than I am.

Another young woman also worried openly about her readiness for college: “Sometimes I feel like I’m not ready or I’m going to fail or do bad … So if I’m stressing now, with the work here, I feel like I’m going to stress even more and I’m going to fail.” For young women, academic challenges like those in Advanced Placement were opportunities to ready themselves for a college future for which they would otherwise be unprepared. “I feel like in college you’re going to need the skills that AP teaches you like the harsh deadlines, the amount of work that they give you … AP classes are like college classes so they’re preparing you for what coming in the future,” another young woman said. “If I don't pay attention in classes,” another worried, “then I won't be able to do good in college or in life.” These differing perspectives on the value of the academic curriculum at Sunrise High School compelled one teacher to note that boys “aren't as serious as the girls are.”

Young women's concerns about inadequate preparation were connected to their sense of broader disadvantages in their communities. “I am in inner city Sunrise,” described a young Black woman. “I am a minority, so I already know college wouldn't have been a given no matter what. So I gotta work hard.” Also, many young women expressed fears about their neighborhood. In contrast, young men sought to display strength and fearlessness in community contexts. They expressed confidence in their neighborhood that contrasted with the anxiety of the young women. In student interviews, young men were more likely to express imperviousness to the sobering challenges common to economically marginalized communities. One young Black man told me he found his neighborhood to be “nice” and “peaceful” despite describing ducking and running from a gun firing bullets from a car window just a year prior. As I walked down neighborhood streets with many of the young men, they expressed their confidence in their ability to skirt interactions with prominent neighborhood gangs. One young man explained, “As long as I’m straight, living good, yeah I don't got a problem with nobody or the neighborhood.”

These gendered sentiments of fear and confidence, toughness and vulnerability, resulted in differing adaptations to the college and career and personal responsibility emphases of the curricula. The teachers” urgings to diligently prepare for the high academic expectations of college worked better for girls than they did for boys. The young women were worried; the young men were not. In the AVID class where I volunteered, four girls regularly reached out to me for college-related questions. Boys almost never reached out. As one young man explained, “I like to figure things out myself. Don't ask for help. That's not how I am. Asking for help is something I don't want to do. Asking for help makes you look stupid.”

The young men carried with them an unyielding belief in themselves and an unwillingness to look vulnerable. They were independent and capable, and that confidence rendered moot their teachers” arguments about hard work toward college readiness. Simon's question of, “What do I need that for?” aptly summarized the general stance about academic rigor among many young men at Sunrise.

Young Men: Playful, Competitive, and Intellectual

Amidst calls for serious diligence towards academic preparation, young men sought to play. My classroom visits were punctuated with the sights and sounds of masculine absurdity. In a chemistry class, a teacher asked the students if they remembered the name of the electrons on an outer orbital. “It starts with a “v”,” he hinted. He was looking for someone to say “valence,” but a boy shouted, “Viagra!” In an English class, a young man tickled another's arm while he tried to work. I heard a young man shout, “It smells like a fat n***a!” in the middle of a physics lecture. I watched a young man turn a whiteboard study session into an illicit hangman game behind the back of a teacher during an AVID class. Teachers who urged seriousness and diligence were met with resistance from young men seeking to redefine the space on their own playful terms.

Nearly all the young men I spoke with worked industriously at finding ways to play at school. Abel, for example, a Latino 4.0 student in two AP courses and on the Robotics team, described the search for entertainment as a primary objective: “I try to find ways to have fun, not have too many boring moments throughout the day so at the end of the day I could say this was a good day and I can't wait for tomorrow.” Simon, a Black young man described the inevitability of masculine playfulness. “Girls take it more seriously. Guys goof too much…this is Sunrise City, man, people ain't taking nothing seriously. It's all fun and games here.” Simon described young women as more likely to be “bookworms.” Bookworms, he explained, “try hard at everything, but that's what they’re supposed to do…They come here, do one thing, got one job, just learn … I’m not a bookworm type … I gotta laugh.” Simon drew a distinction between “the bookworms” and “the goofies,” aligning himself and most of his masculine friends firmly in the goofy camp. To a Latino man I interviewed, goofiness was indicative that a person was at ease. “If you’re not goofy, that means you’re not comfortable,” he told me. The goofiness of his friend group meant, “they’re comfortable with me, and I’m comfortable with them.” Another Latino boy agreed. “Girls, I noticed that they really like doing work,” he told me. “They’re more serious than us.” In a separate interview, his girlfriend echoed these sentiments. She said, “I guess we just want to be more prepared and the guys. They like to play around a lot.” Another young woman expressed frustration with masculine playfulness. “It's fun once in a while, but this is high school. You’re supposed be doing something.”

Young men as playful, competitive intellectuals

Despite limited intellectual engagement for many young men in the classroom, they all demonstrated intellectual interests beyond it. I sat with Quincy, a Black senior, and Lucas, a multiracial Black and Mexican American junior, at a picnic bench as they avoided helping set up for volleyball practice. They were engaged in a lively debate about the Batman comic book series. Lucas turned to me “How many Robins are there?” he asked. “Three, right?” I was unclear about the question. Lucas explained to me that while people typically think of Robin as just one person, perpetually serving as Batman's sidekick, the character was actually three separate individuals. Quincy, Lucas's best friend, who he often described as “like family,” disagreed. Quincy believed there was only one Robin, and they argued loudly from opposite sides of the bench.

“I’m talking about the timeline,” explained Lucas. Quincy yelled back, “I’m talking about the original one that everybody knows!” Lucas calmly but assertively conveyed his knowledge of the Batman storyline, gesturing pointedly as he spoke.

If you know the story, it was three Robins. … This is the original timeline … the original one is the first one dies, and they get a second one. … the second one, he didn't want to be with Batman because he saw Batman do bad stuff or something. And then the third one is Batman's son. And then when they grew up, the first one that died—didn't die. He becomes Red Robin that kills people and stuff … He a mercenary… I researched this!

Quincy tried to match Lucas” calm deliberate style, but inevitably got excited until another young man approached the table. “Clippers gonna take the championship this year,” the young men said, attempting to engage the two some sports banter. Quincy, and Lucas, usually willing to indulge him, this time issued a sharp reprimand. “Shut up! Go away!” Lucas yelled. The young man retreated, and Quincy and Lucas returned to their conversation.

Lucas implored Quincy to “take the L.” There were three Robins. He had proved it. Quincy refused. “I’m sorry but I’m right! … Everybody know you cannot make a story starting off with three people!” Quincy's voice had now risen to a high-pitched shout. I interjected, “Can't you both win and then you both get a W?” “No!” they both shouted at me in unison.

This intersection of play, competition, and intellectualism was common among the young men at the school. Lucas was part of a campus fraternity where debates about sports, neighborhood drama, romantic relationships, and the school's social dynamics occurred among the young men regularly. They were engaged in the community, volunteering at a local elementary school, participating in student government, and choreographing elaborate step (dance) routines for the student assemblies. Also, the school had robust Robotics and engineering teams in which mostly young men competed, producing elaborate robots and complex computer code. Some were entrepreneurs. One young man told me about a wildly profitable shoe resale business he managed after school, and another had a successful snack business he discretely operated out of his backpack between classes.

Young men were not averse to thinking or intellectualism. Lucas explained, “I like learning. When you look at my phone, it's mostly anime and nerd stuff.” Lucas told me he researched game theory and notions of alternate universes online, imagining parallel dimensions compelled by different decisions that individuals make. Another young man told me, “I just love learning. Since pretty much when I was born my parents were teaching me new things. I just paid attention a lot.” Young men eagerly described themselves as smart. They believed in the value of education; it was “the key to success,” one told me. They enjoyed learning, researching, and discussion, but did so on their own terms, devoid of concerns about college preparation.

Playful intellectualism and the classroom

Though classroom activities that engaged most of the young men were rare, occasionally teachers designed learning experiences around discussion, performance, and relevant curricula that captivated many young men. Two of these lessons were designed by the well-loved U.S. History teacher. In one, I watched young men develop skits about the American Revolution, making jokes and demonstrating knowledge about the events that founded our nation. In another lesson, she crafted an extended class conversation on core tensions in modern day immigration that was supplemented with a seven-minute clip of a past Clinton-Trump debate. She provided questions to frame the conversation. The ensuing discussion was intellectual and the students were sharp. Students were eager to participate, and young men spoke slightly more than the young women. One young man shared, “Everybody should get basic health care…just because you’re an immigrant mean you don't get a checkup?” After their comments, Ms. Collins was quick with compliments. “I love the way you express yourself,” she remarked after one particularly impassioned contribution. When the conversation turned to whether undocumented immigrants deserved access to education, a Black young man, often dalistracted in school, displayed an intellectual anger that was uncommon in classrooms. He was frustrated at the notion of denying a group of people access to learning. “That's what they did to us! … They didn't want us to learn!” he exclaimed, drawing an enthusiastic parallel between enslavement, Jim Crow, and the calls to deny education to immigrants today. Lessons that encouraged students to create or to engage questions of crucial importance to immediate challenges of their communities were beneficial to all students, but particularly to young Black and Latino men. Unfortunately, these moments were rare in Sunrise classrooms.

Thus, while young men believed in the importance of going to college, they resisted calls to work hard in preparation. These calls were grounded in the anxiety of under-preparation, and they were misaligned with students” home cultures and the real challenges in the Sunrise communities. Young men largely did not believe they ought to be anxious about college. They had intellectual pursuits—debates about sports, literary analysis of comic books, and considerations of social dynamics—but their enactment of intellectualism as playful and connected to their interests were rarely permitted in Sunrise classrooms. Young men at Sunrise High School largely avoided academically rigorous college preparation.

Discussion

The experiences of Sunrise students support the narrative of the misalignment of cultural identity and school for young men—academic engagement a square peg and urban masculinity a round hole. The contradictions embedded in masculine ideals of toughness were amplified by the college preparatory academic expectations at the school. Young men saw themselves as carefree and playful. Schoolwork was to be stressed over and taken seriously. Young men sought dominance and confidence. Schooling expected them to be vulnerable. The curriculum was disconnected from young men's identities and experiences, and instead focused on the development of skills and academic content for college readiness. As such, for most young men, the urgent messaging from teachers about college readiness missed the mark. “What do I need that for?” was a typically masculine response to the ostensibly college preparatory offerings at Sunrise. In discussing the findings, I interrogate here how the college preparatory messaging of Sunrise High School—and perhaps of college preparatory efforts more generally—aggravate rather than soften the contradictions of masculine toughness.

College Preparation as Serious; Masculine Toughness as Playful

Messages about college-going in the U.S. high school context are anything but playful. The calls to increase college access in marginalized communities have been urgent and unrelenting. K-12 education policy language frames college access as in dire need of expansion particularly among racially minoritized community (Johnson & Mejia, 2020). Standards and test regimes are designed to be rigorous and aligned with the expectations of college classrooms (Conley et al., 2011). College entrance exam preparation is framed as a “no pain, no gain” enterprise by prominent college-access organizations (Sanchez & Cruce, 2019). Students are told college is essential for future success, and those who fail to attend will suffer consequences. As Glass and Nygreen (2011) argue, college going messaging “carries big sticks that punish the very students proclaimed to be the beneficiaries” (p. 4). Amidst widespread beliefs that students from marginalized backgrounds are unprepared for college and the hard and rigorous work required to ready them, the gravity of the college readiness enterprise rests heavily on the shoulders of urban educators who overwhelm their students with college preparatory demands (Martinez et al., 2020).

These messages elevating the seriousness of college preparation presume that students are worried about their academic success in college. In this study, though many young women fretted about their college readiness, few young men expressed any such worry. They were carefree and playful. Though their playfulness was often disruptive in classroom settings, outside of the classroom, they deftly merged their playful tendencies with areas of intellectual interests. Young men were not anti-intellectual. Rather, they adapted their intellectual pursuits to ideals of carefree play at the center of masculine identity (Majors & Billson, 1993; Morris, 2012; Willis, 1977). They were “goofy,” and declined to sacrifice that element of their personality in their intellectual endeavors.

College Preparation as Vulnerability; Masculine Toughness as Dominance

College preparation in urban contexts is framed around the vulnerability of racially minoritized students. Educators might view students as “unworthy” of college, suggesting that they need to make fundamental changes in their behaviors and outlooks to adequately prepare for postsecondary success (Convertino & Graboski-Bauer, 2018). For students in urban schools, college-preparatory opportunities are ostensibly weak—they undermine college-going aspirations (Strayhorn, 2009) and underprepare students even in the most rigorous of courses (Hallett & Venegas, 2011). College preparatory programs in schools have been founded on deficit assumptions about racially minoritized students (Brown, 2013). The prominent messages of college-going ask urban students to acknowledge their disadvantages and work hard to overcome them.

In urban schools, messages of college vulnerability collide with ideals of masculinity. Though college readiness practices at Sunrise High School asked that young men be vulnerable—to acknowledge a lack of preparation and to make a commitment to prepare—young men actively avoided vulnerability and asserted strength and dominance in social and intellectual pursuits. They expressed a sense of fearlessness in their neighborhoods and saw themselves as confident leaders in their communities. They expressed similar confidence in their ability to compete with college peers—“I don't see anything that they doing that I can't do,” one said. They avoided asking questions for fear of looking “stupid.” In their intellectual pursuits, young men often competed, jockeying for positioning in competitions of cognitive and social prowess. They sought to win debates about the literary catalog of Batman and Robin. They achieved leadership roles in the school and the community. They enacted masculinity by way of competition and dominance in their intellectual and social endeavors, and they saw little resonance in academic messaging that stressed weakness and vulnerability.

Thus, the experiences of these young men negotiating their school's college readiness practices illuminate the dual nature of masculine toughness in urban contexts and the ways these manifestations of masculinity constrain educational opportunity. While theories of masculinity and applications in educational contexts have suggested that young men might resist schooling, this study has elevated the specific ways in which messaging in urban schools around college readiness present challenges to young men. In emphasizing seriousness over play and vulnerability over strength in preparing for college, young men experience disequilibrium in their schools and classrooms. As such, I turn now to a consideration of what a gender relevant pedagogy might mean for the college readiness of young men.

Towards Gender Relevant College Preparation

Culturally relevant pedagogies are essential to academic engagement (Dee & Penner, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 1995). The unique cultures of masculinity forming at the intersection of gender, race, and social class might compel us to consider how our pedagogies can achieve “gender relevance” for underserved young men of color in urban schools (Bristol, 2015). And given the challenges of young Black and Latino men during the college transition (Harper, 2012; Saenz & Ponjuan, 2009), a culturally and gender relevant curriculum may be particularly pertinent to college readiness efforts at urban schools.

As such, educators concerned with the academic preparation of young Black and Latino men might work to align academically rigorous college preparation with the ways young men engage in their social worlds. In particular, the data here suggest expertise and play are essential to engaging young men in the academic rigors of college preparation. First, young men's expertise might be considered in designing curriculum. When connected to issues pertinent to their communities and embedded in their social worlds, young men become experts. They can build literacy and numeracy through a consideration of community issues like immigration, poverty, sports, or popular culture. Teachers might consider posing open-ended questions to students or develop projects that allow young men to pursue their own intellectual interests while building academic skill. When young men are allowed to explore their own ideas and can be experts in classroom content, they can feel a sense of empowerment (i.e., “masculine toughness”) traditionally denied to them in classroom settings. Second, allowing for playful interaction in classrooms might permit young men to apply a carefree spirit to academic preparation. Young men at Sunrise High School resisted the tedium of a curriculum primarily grounded in textbooks and PowerPoint lecture. Allowing for more play, performance, and creativity might invite more young men to develop academic skills towards postsecondary readiness. The effectiveness of leveraging cultural expertise (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and play (Garcia, 2017) has robust support in the academic literature and may be particularly important for engaging young men of color in school (Bristol, 2015).

Schooling is particularly disconnected from the experiences of students of color and organized in ways antithetical to how young men enact masculinity. When learning is framed solely around a need to be academically prepared for college, young men like Sosaia wonder, “How am I going to us this in my daily life?” Young men like Lucas insist, “You can still get into college without AP!” The young men differed from the young women in their approach to school as well as the community. Consider their conflicting descriptions of Sunrise City: a place where a young woman said people “gotta work hard,” but a young man said “people ain't taking nothing seriously.” Though messages of college-going emphasized seriousness and vulnerability, messages of masculinity emphasized playfulness and strength. If college preparatory practices can harness the intellectual interests and experiences of young men, they might more effectively engage them in academic challenges that actually prepare them for college.

Conclusion

This study has asserted the intellectualism of young Black and Latino men, but the inability of college preparatory curricula to nurture their unique brand of intellectualism. Notions of college unpreparedness and its associated anxieties might be more readily internalized by young women than young men. When guided by messages centered on fear and inadequacy, the masculine path towards academic opportunity may become even more labyrinthian. Importantly, however, the intellectualism of young men at Sunrise indicated strong possibilities for academic engagement. When culturally relevant and connected to their notions of identity, young Black and Latino men were eager participants in intellectual discussion. If college readiness can be more effectively couched in a manner aligned with their cultural realities, college readiness might be enhanced for young men of color.

Ultimately, providing access to academic opportunity for more young men necessitates profound philosophical adjustments in approaches to urban schooling. Considering theories of gender and cultural relevance alongside theories of college going can broaden our understanding of these processes for racially minoritized young men. Simply urging college preparation is not sufficient. When young men resist academic rigor towards college preparation, they do not do so because they are un-intellectual and incapable of academic challenge. They may resist because they do not buy the argument that is being presented to them. They believe they do not need college preparation. They will be fine. A new argument for rigorous academic engagement might be centered the strengths and communities of young men in urban schools. As currently constructed, the strategies for encouraging academic rigor among young men in urban schools are falling short, and the research here suggests important opportunities for revamping an ineffective invitation to college preparation for Black and Latino boys.